Spirits of the Past

!UGPFF-Unoffficial-Selection-laurels-SL-Text-Transparent.png

Impatience is a virtue. After filming my first short last year, I was keen to make another almost immediately. Just something fun I could throw up on youtube. As I started working through some ideas, I started to think about how long the previous short took. How much time I spent sourcing the cast and crew, organising locations, scheduling the shoot, editing the raw footage. Too much. I wanted it to be faster. I didn't want all that hassle. I'm a writer, I'm inherently lazy. Isn't there some way I could make a film, from initial idea to final cut, without ever leaving my sofa?

Spirits of the Past is what came from that idle notion. A movie made entirely online. The original script, the auditions, the table read, the rehearsals, the editing, the whole thing was done from my sofa. I've still not met half the cast in real life.

We did the whole thing live, a 15 minute take. Much of the editing was done live too. I was part of the hangout but hidden, and from there I was able to control the camera and move between the characters without Google forcing my hand. Once it was done I made a few tweaks, tidied up the sound as best I could, cut out some noise, and stuck some credits to the end. Aside from that this is essentially a raw live performance.

This is not the future of film. The audio and video quality isn't nearly good enough yet and the frame is limited (you can't record live hangouts on an iphone yet, so movement around locations is inherently tricky. I tried.) but as an experiment, as a proof of concept, I am extremely pleased with the results.

Huge thanks to all the actors who gave their time. Let me know what you think, share with your friends. Call up some old pals maybe, it'd be nice to catch up right? Stay gold.

Declan

The two supermodels scream, but Sir Mick just SMILES his endless grin, as we... ...SMASH TO CREDITS.

I like to write some. In fact my main motivation getting in to magic was the thought that I could do shows of an evening, and sit and write scripts all day. You need to be practical about your career choices. Most of the stuff I write is terrible. I'm not trying to be modest here, it really is. I hear that this is a process, like Andy Dufresne, you need to crawl through a river of shit before you come out clean.

I'm still crawling through the shit right now, but I'm getting there. My most recent annoyance is setting the tone. I try my best to go against my natural affinity to ramble when writing scene descriptions. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But I keep writing, and most importantly, I keep reading.

If you're interested in scripts, and even if you're not, you should check out this article I read today; http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Cinemas-Invisible-Art

It picks out some of the finest descriptive work in films, and shines a light on some of the best writing that nobody ever really reads. Shane Black is a master at this, and you can see why his scripts sold for so much back in the day. You start one of his scripts and you can almost feel him in the room, excitedly pitching this idea to you. They give a great example from the Lethal Weapon script in the article, but here's another one of my favourites from an unmade script called Shadow Company.

INT. TORCHY'S - SAIGON - NIGHT

Dim. Smoke filled. Scratchy JUKE MUSIC.

NIKO enters, cases the joint:

Soldiers. Junkies. Assassins. Combinations thereof.

Missing eyes, limbs, morals.

Perfect.

More recently, the comic book writer Brian K Vaughan has used a similar style on some of his scripts, the as yet unproduced script ROUNDTABLE has one of my favourite opening descriptions ever, it just sets the tone for the rest of the film so perfectly.

EXT. MEDIEVAL ENGLAND - TWILIGHT

A crowd of SCREAMING PEASANTS charges over the rolling green hills of sixth-century Britain.

But just when you start to worry that this is going to be a shitty historical drama, we push in close on one of these moaning peasants to reveal WORMS crawling through the flesh of its reanimated corpse-face.

Oh, okay, neat. These marauding farmhands are actually an ARMY OF THE UNDEAD.

ZOMBIE

REEARRRGHHHRG!

Seriously, who doesn't want to see that movie?

The History of the Mash Up

Originally published in Scot/campus 2007 McSleazy

Cities have played a large role in musical history. Geographical and social situations coalesce and from the melting pot musical genres emerge. The production lines of Detroits motor city, and the largely multiracial community led to the creation of motown, and the civil rights movement and anger at the government led to the MC5. Liverpool was one of the first places in the UK where rock n roll records hit our shores thanks to the vibrant shipping industry, and a few plucky young lads got inspired and started their own rock n roll band. But never before has a musical genre found it’s home in the ether. As much as many creators of the mashup will claim it was their city that started the trend, the natural home of the mashup isn’t geographical.

Mcsleazy: It's the first style of music that owes it's popularity and current existence to the internet. The collation of acapellas, the meeting of like minded folk, the distribution of the finished article - the internet is integral to all the stages of the creation of the bootleg There's no other style of music where this is the case I had the 2manyDjs album, I had heard and enjoyed freelance hellraisers stroke of genieus. I even had a copy of the whipped cream mixes by the evolution control committee on vinyl, but I don’t think I truly embraced the mashup until I found it online. As far as I knew, mashups had come and gone. But then someone sent me a link to the sixxmixx, a weekly san Francisco radio show by partyben, dovoted to mashups and available to download. It was a revelation. It was harmonious, exciting, current. This wasn’t just a comedy mashup, this was something more, something that had excited me with the older mashups. Using the sixx mix as my first landmaek, I’ve been abel to back track from this point and discover a thriving and very much alive culture of mashup artists that have amazed me with their skill and imagination. Party ben of course, but Dj Riko, Pojmasta, Lou and Placido, DJ Zebra, the cassette boys, and of course, Glasgow’s own McSleazy.

Mcsleazy started get your bootleg on a few years ago, and it has become a monster, the natural home for the masup, where old veterans and kids just getting started all share the same spaze, it’s a singularly original place in the music industry. It’s democratic, and the respect you earn comes from your genuine skill and your general manner. Anyone can make a mashup these days, gybo represents a place to share ideas, to share the finished product, the internet provides the raw materials in p2p software, and increasingly, it provides the tools.

McSleazy: Technology is a factor too. It's like the first time someone madfe a cheap, easily accessible guitar. Suddenly everyone bought one, but 98% of the tunes people wrote were crap In mashup’s case, the guitar is a program called ACID by sony, in recent years seemingly tailoring itself to bootleg production, making it ever easier, ever simpler for someone to go from idea, to finished article, to sharing it with the world in a matter of hours. Indeed, on McSleazy’s radio show he does just that, asks the listeners to choose some track and gets someone to mash them together into a new song before the show is finished.

Do you think it's as strong now as ever? How sustainable an genre do you think it is?

The quality ratio is the same. The level of originality wavers. They've been very successful recently

As for sustainability - it's a unique genre. It bounces off every other style of music, so if any style of music becomes fashionable or popular, then the bootlegs can reflect that it's constantly evolving and bouncing off styles. it's always fresh

Why do you think many people don't take it too seriously? do you take it seriously? As a genre in itself?

Record Companies dismiss it. They used to embrace it, but then they didn't know what to do with it. They thought that because it was an underground style of music, they could exploit it. But how do you commercialise something that's fundamentally a bastardisation of what the record companies do? They couldn't figure out how to make money out of it Bands generally liked it Radio stations loved it the press jumped on it too I kept doing it cos of the reaction when I was djing

I mean in more of a public perception. I was thinking that it's diffcult for people to see beyond it as a bit of fun. Perhaps because there is no original voice within the music. Even something as sample heavy as hip hop has a some personal voice in it, however slight

Yes, but the wider public have just put Chico Time at number 1 for the second week running. But do you consider it important to be taken seriously? I think mashups can be very disarming, they can strip a track of whatever message or meaning it may have already had

"they can strip a track of whatever message or meaning it may have already had" - that's a 2 way street - it can add meaning too the best bootlegs - i think - are ones that mix genres, messages, styles and create something new

A bad mash-up can ruin two songs at once. A good mash-up takes two songs that you already know, and makes a completely new track that the listener is already familiar with. Like I said, the main outlet I have - apart from the radio - is djing live. When people hear the intro to a track, then something new kicks in, it's always, always a good reaction. I've played tracks that I thought may be too sacreligious to abuse, but there's not been an instance of that yet.

No, it should absolutely not be taken seriously. It's party music.

Party music, absolutely. The joy of the mashup, the thing that separates it from other entirely sample based music like DJ shadows output, is the familiarity. When you’re out at a disco you are waiting for those first few bars of that song you love, it’s all about expectation and delivery. Mashups give you expectation, then surprise, then more expectation. It keeps you on your toes and makes you laugh and smile as well as dance and shake your ass. This constant battle between what you love, what you think you’ve heard a thousand times and suddenly hear for the first time all over again is what makes mashups so wonderful, so powerful. Also it’s a democratic artform where everything is welcome. Gone are any animosity in the listeners mind, nothing is cool and nothing is sacred, it’s all music there to be enjoyed.

yeah - i've done some really slow downtempo bootlegs that i still think are really good but the dancefloor friendly ones are the ones everyone remembers and people always come back to you a week or so later telling you songs that they think will go well together

Perhaps the main reason the bootleg has remained undergroung is the very dubious nature of How do you get away with the copywrite stuff?

Get away in what sense?

Like, i see what happens to a lot of bootleg sites, the cease and desist orders etc and yet here you are,with you're own website with your own stuff on it, plus a radio show and that stuff you're doing for the film, you are quite high profile in the scene, and yet you don't seem to have been targetted

It's possibly because of the major label affiliations that I've not been targetted How can the BPI claim to represent the very people who are employing me ? and try and stop me doing it?

it's quite farcical

it's an irrelevance. lets say i mix gorillaz with franz Ferdinand. i'm not putting out anything which the public can go out and buy i'm not affecting any sales i'm surely introducing some people to the music of these artists i'm not costing the labels anything

Inevitably, as the mash up scene gets older and larger, people will tend to drift away from the simplicity of A vs B, tend to float more towards a style of glitch pop or perhaps some kind of atonal experimentation, like these pursuits are somehow more worthy, more artistic, but I think, at heart, the simplicity of the mashup is what makes it so wonderful, the accessibility of it, how something can be so familiar and so strange all at once, it’s a beguiling form. There are often misses, no doubt, but when they hit they hit hard, and you forget how the orginal songs went, there is a moment of serendipity, and you think, fuck art, let’s dance.

The Arrows

darts Sorry about this one, I’m trying to give you my full attention but I keep being drawn to the TV. Not just in some ADD afflicted way where I see something flashing or some bare skin, my whole body is being drawn into the decadent world in front of me. A world of gold rings and chandeliers populated by Vikings and Counts, the most glorious social club in the world. You know what I’m talking about, it’s that time of year. I’m drawn to the Lakeside. Ladies and gentlemen! Are you ready! Let’s! Play! Darts!

I never made a conscious effort to love the arrows; it genuinely did draw me in, deeper and deeper every year. It started when I was younger, when I’d tune into BBC2 after Neighbours hoping to find the Fresh Prince and I’d be confronted by the darts. I’d piss and moan a bit but it was better than the news. I’d watch it for a while, I didn’t really understand the rules back then but it killed half an hour and they were throwing sharp things which appealed to me as a youngster. (I used to be into throwing knives, my kitchen door took a hell of a beating, but that’s not important right now.)

I really fell I love with darts when I got to university. It’s one of the few sports that the BBC has left, so, along with snooker, they give it everything they’ve got. And as a student with lots of free time during the days you can’t really avoid it, since, on a typical weekday during the World Championship, between the hours of 12 pm and 1 am BBC2 shows eight hours of darts. Funnily enough, it was again caused by me flicking the channel after Neighbours, but now it was the 1.40 slot rather than the 5.35. The darts were on, I’d look at my housemates and we’d decide to leave it on while we all did some work, wrote some essays, read some books. Suddenly it was one in the morning and I’m making another round of tea because Andy Fordham has just made an amazing comeback and I know it’s a bit shit but I just want to see who wins.

And as soon as you see who wins, before you have a second to breathe, another two champions burst out to the sound of some wonderful and completely non ironic entrance music, usually something from the eighties, usually a bit silly, but it grabs your attention. Sometimes you’re slack-jawed, unable to comprehend a man who looks like that doing a funny little dance to a song you’ve not heard in about fifteen years. Suddenly they’re under way and you’re drawn in again. It’s an inevitability, just get sucked in, you’ll love it, there’s a lot to love.

You can go in blind too, the rules are pretty simple, I’m not explaining them here, you’ll pick them up, and in every game you’ll find someone to cheer for. Most of the players are some kind of British, but there’s the odd Australian and loads of Dutch. It’s the biggest sport in Holland outside of football. But whilst you can, and probably should, ally yourself to your country you’ll inevitably find yourself drawn to the guy with the most ridiculous haircut or the one with the most jewels. And that’s not always as simple a decision as it seems.

But let’s not dwell too much on the silly haircuts and the incongruous gold, because that kind of novelty will only last so long, there’s real drama here, genuine excitement, and, perhaps surprisingly, style.

Not in the game itself, I mean, you go to your local pub and watch some darts and you don’t see anything stylish, perhaps it’s just as exciting but it won’t be as wonderfully staged as it is on TV. I mean, think of any other sport that you watch in split screen? A sport where you can watch the player and his agonising pressure, his shaky hand, the release of the dart and then the magical split second between split screens where anything can happen, you hang like the dart in the air, unsure of where you’ll land, then you suddenly slam home with that wonderful acoustic thud. The split screen has gone three ways these days too, you get the board, the player and the player’s suffering family. Coupled with the rhythmic thud of metal on cork all they need is a little LED clock in the middle and you realise where the creators of 24 got their inspiration.

Not just the split screen either, darts has slow mo shots, board shots, hand cam, dart cam, slow mo dart cam, wide shots of the crowd, pressure zooms when they might get the 180. The slow motion dart throw actually reminds you of how impressive the skill of throwing a dart over such a distance really is, I’ve grown so used to seeing the split screen version I forget what is actually going on live, it’s taken for granted.

But again, like the jewels, the stylisation of the game illustrates a wonderful opposition, a reminder of the class system that we’ll never escape. It’s like a taxi driver doing a ballet, like the servants having a party in the manor house while Lord Snooty’s on holiday, like a bunch of screaming hens in a limousine. The whole thing takes place in a giant pub for chrissakes! You half expect a large proportion of the crowd to scuttle off to play the gamblers in the breaks between matches. And the post match analysis? Well, it’s the ubiquitous Ray Stubbs and Bobby George sat, where else, but at the bar.

Game on!

Daniel Kitson - Feature & Interview - Originally published in The Skinny 2007

Daniel Kitson - C90 I wasn't sure we were going to get the interview with the lovely Daniel Kitson so I wrote this piece below first.

I don’t think Daniel Kitson is one of the countries top stand up comedians, despite all his trophies. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s easily one of the best and most interesting performers, I just don’t think stand up comedy is really what he does. The image you’ll usually conjure when imagining one of the countries top stand up comedians is the dark and smoky room, the spotlight, and the lone performer facing off against a rowdy club. You see, when I think of Daniel Kitson I have two enduring images, and neither of them involve smoky rooms, spotlights or brick walls . The first is of a slightly awkward but wonderfully charming geek, sat amongst a collection of lamps, reading me stories. The second image is one of Kitson stood alone, late on a Saturday night, looking out across the fights and drunks and the vomit, and he’s looking right at me, and he’s clutching a single red balloon in his right hand.

The first image comes from a show he did in 2005 entitled Stories for the Wobbly Hearted, a departure from the usual stand up format, Kitson sat centre stage in an armchair, surrounded by lamps reading cute, funny and poignant stories from his notebook, interspersed with video images and short clips he himself made. The second image is even more powerful because it isn’t an image I’ve seen, it’s simply an idea that was painted in my head when I was lucky enough to see one of his shows at the Stand here in Glasgow at the beginning of the year. This was a more traditional format, but it certainly wasn;t a traditional show. At times it felt like he was simply lecturing us about life. Effortlessly charming and engaging, the show veered from the typical ranting stand up - an unstoppable tirade against Nuts magazine and everything it stands for was particularly vitriolic - but then within moments he is talking quite touchingly about how much he loves the world’s strongest man,(the TV show the world’s strongest man, not literally his love for the strongest man in the world.) and how much the show meant to him and his brothers, and you love him all over again.

This contrast in his set, from the foul mouthed gags to the touching tale makes it difficult to pin him down. I just don’t think it’d be correct to call him a stand up comedian. Although it also feels an injustice to label him a story teller. He doesn’t tell your typical comedy stories, these aren’t shaggy dog tales about a guy down the pub with a three legged dog and oh this one time me and the wife. No. This is Raymond Carver presented as stand-up, this is an indie comic book in human form. His observations on the minutiae of every day life transcend stand up comedy, and the images and ideas he plants in your head will stick with you longer than any punch line. If you go to see him expecting a gag merchant you’ll be disappointed, he’s not consistently hilarious, but he is always engaging, and easily one of the most original entertainers out there.

This clash of style has culminated in the inevitable, a new play called C-90, which plays at the Arches in Glasgow from the 23rd to the 28th of January. The play, written by and starring Kitson himself, gives Kitson room to breathe, no longer shackled to comedic expectations, here he can elaborate on moments, he can weave his stories into a narrative, he can create vivid characters and create a lifetime of incidents and emotional connections. The hook he uses to tie this all together is the C-90 of the title, an almost obsolete brand of cassette tape. The narrative of the play follows Kitson as Henry, on the last day of his job working at a repository for old and discarded compilation tapes. At first he is seemingly uninterested, but he finds a tape addressed to himself, and from there we begin an often funny, touching and intimate tumble through one man’s memories, moments, and stories.

Like I said at the start, I don’t think Daniel Kitson is one of the best stand up comics in Britain, but with C-90, he has finally found the format that allows him to truly shine. A literary mixtape. Only not one you simply stick in the machine and listen to, this is one covered in a biro scrawl of liner notes and jokes and pictures of cocks. It’s an extremely personal gift, from him, to us, and one that we should cherish.

Turns out we did get the interview though, so I wrote this too.

Daniel Kitson's play/monologue C-90 was considered a triumph at this year's Fringe. We managed to secure an interview with the magnificent Mr K in advance of his performance of the work at the Arches Theatre in Glasgow this month.

Was the process of writing C-90 very different to how you would usually write your stand-up material? Do you feel more comfortable performing explicitly written work?

The writing of C-90 was the most intensive and pressured writing of a piece of work I've ever done. Story writing is always different to stand-up, in that it's genuinely written; stand up is more evolutionary in process. Yes, you heard, 'evolutionary in process'. I said that. You ask me to talk about the 'process' and I'm going to give you both barrels. That was one. Here comes the other...

With stand-up I have an idea or a feeling and I talk around it and into it. Stories very much have to be written out and learnt in. Phrasing and pace and so on are massively key because I want it to resonate beyond the moment. I want it to stand up in isolation. But I wrote C-90 in about three weeks in July. I knew the idea, the set build was already in place, the theatre booked and advertising out - but I really didn't have anything. It had to be that way due to the way work panned out last year, so I knew it was going to be a scary July. But it was VERY scary and VERY VERY hot. I wrote most of it in my kitchen, typing on a USB keyboard because my laptop was too hot to touch, with three fans pointing at me, in little more than my pants. The image of the writer is so poetic.

There you go, both barrels.

Which playwrights do you most admire?

The obvious ones really: Beckett and Bennett. Even though I know little of both of their stuff, you just get a sense of them as being genuinely wonderful. I saw The History Boys in New York, the film and the power of the writing is just utterly wonderful - so human and compassionate and really really funny. Bennett's stuff is so very generous and its writerly perfection beyond its humanity is what moves me.

Stories for the Wobbly Hearted is a very different style of performance. Were you initially worried about the presumptions of the stand-up audience? I'm thinking of the Bill Hicks line: "don't worry, the dick jokes are coming later." You know?

Not with Stories for the Wobbly Hearted, no. I was concerned with A Made Up Story. It was the first story show I did - in 2003. That one really split people: people loved it, people hated it, and worst of all, people admired the intention but thought it wasn't very good. That plays into your fears about your own work in a fairly accurate and saddening way. But by the time Stories for the Wobbly Hearted came around in 2005 there was a watershed moment when I realised I just had to commit to the thing from the start, no preemptive apology or warning or explanation. Just commit to the nature of the thing.

Do you see a promising future for the theatre, in terms of audience, intellectual development, form, or anything else that comes to mind?

I'm not really interested. I'm interested in people doing brilliant things and I don't care if its theatre or art or comedy or film or cooking or architecture or transport or public service. Anything that surpasses necessity is lovely.

Does the performance of C-90 differ from venue to venue? Would you be happy for someone else to perform C-90?

Well, at the time of writing I've only done it in one venue (The Traverse in Edinburgh). The layout will change a touch on the tour. But generally the performance will be the same.

It's weird: I've been asked if I would license the text for others to perform and I wouldn't do that. It's entirely personal - it's mine, it's me, telling my story. There would be something fundamentally wrong in someone else speaking it. It's not a play. It's me talking.

What reasons do you have for remaining such a resolutely live performer? You must have had countless TV offers by now, does nothing attract you? Not even a stint as guest host on the World's Strongest Man (Kitson has expressed fondness for the show in his routines)?

I've not had any good offers - that's basically it. The vast vast majority of television is a let down, as is the majority of comedy, and theatre and art and everything. But when you hear who won what at the British Comedy Awards you do sort of despair. It's all pap. All the current heroes are just irrelevant to anything that's great.

So when the offers come in, there is just nothing appealing about them. You just go: well, why would I possibly do that; I'd have to be a desperate idiot to do that. And I'm not. Just yet. So I'll probably leave it thanks.